


Belonged to Someone Else

by auburn



Series: Seven Walls [4]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Ancient Cities, Angst, Captivity, Drama, Escape, Exile, Gen, Rescue, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-31
Updated: 2007-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-06 11:18:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auburn/pseuds/auburn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He ran for seven years, he'll look for home that long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Belonged to Someone Else

The planet had no name. Even the glyphs to open its gate had been forgotten, lost in the ages that followed the Wraith war. Its people were long gone before then. When its gate no longer activated, even the Keepers let the memory pass into darkness. Where there was no hunting or enemies, the Wraith had little interest.   
  
For more than ten thousand years, the ice reached out from its poles. Snow dusted down each season until it packed deep in the valleys the sun never reached and all but the most stubborn life fled toward the equator.   
  
Then…a plate deep beneath the permafrost shifted. It shivered through mile after mile of stone and earth. A continent shrugged, like a dreamer shedding a fly. A cliff crumbled and a valley floor rose. A finger of magma stretched toward the surface and a mountain boiled from a seabed and built itself in a fury of pumping lava. The ocean currents changed. Rain fell instead of snow. A warm wind melted the edges of an ice shelf, drip by plinking drop. Thousands of years of snow tumbled away from the canted Ring of the Ancestors and the distant sun warmed it. The land burst into riotous life again as winter slowly loosed its hold.   
  
And, on another world, a panicked man named Kerren slipped and hit the wrong glyph.   
  
~*~    
  
Ronon dipped his oar in the water and paddled north. Wisps of the morning fog still clung to the water, but the day had cleared enough to go out, though clouds scudded across a gray sky. Kerren's hunting party had created a permanent camp along the graveled shore of a vast, ice-edged bay and most of the men and women were out on the water, trailing nets. Ronon was scouting. Truthfully, he was seeking a space away from the others. He had grown uneasy in the company of too many, including Letila, when he could see in their – especially her - eyes that they expected him to stay. He hadn't come to the refugees' world to settle, merely to rest for a season, before returning to his futile hunt again.   
  
That he'd brought Joongwa and half of her tribe to join the settlement's numbers after crossing paths with them again didn't mean he was any kind of leader. He had owed the Balusi for their aid and he couldn't take them to Atlantis. Even the Athosians had left Lantea to live on the planet the Ancestors, during their ill-fated return, had chosen for them. No one not of Earth was welcome in Atlantis now; the Earthers were arrogant and insular as the Ancestors themselves. Truly, they were the descendants of the Ancestors. But Kerren had told him their group needed more people and given him the Ring glyphs for this world, promising a place whenever Ronon was ready.   
  
This was a harsh world still, that the Satedan refugees and other culling survivors had taken as their own, but it welcomed them. Toward the equator, there were plains populated by grazers that darkened the land from horizon to horizon, land that could be cultivated, ruins that were no more than right-angled depressions in the earth. Here, though, the ice still reigned, even in summer.   
  
Ronon liked it. The Wraith preferred warm, wet worlds, jungle and forest; the fierce winds and barren plains in this place offered them no welcome and would slow them down.   
  
A jut of ice, purple-gray in the shade, made him steer his little boat farther out from the shore and one of the predators they had begun calling _iq'qaba_ crested out of the water, a sinuous black curve twice as long as Ronon himself. It rolled to the side and regarded him from an ink-black eye, then twisted and dove deep with a splash of its tail.   
  
Ronon watched the disturbed water where it had been. The _iq'qaba_ seemed more curious than not, content to feast on fish, though one of the larger ones had ripped a net from the fishermen the day before, pulling Damak into the water.   
  
Kerren had pulled the shaking man from the freezing water, scolding him, yelling that sometimes you had to know when to let go. Ronon had decided then to scout the shoreline alone when Kerren caught him watching. He wasn't ready to let go.   
  
The _iq'qaba_ didn't return and Ronon paddled beyond the point, discovering a maze of melted channels and towering bergs. He propelled his boat through them cautiously, watching the current, wary of being crushed between two floating islands of ice.   
  
He didn't look up until the boat emerged into a wider pool, when a shaft of scintillent sunshine mirrored off the water and refracted off soaring crystal spires. At first, Ronon thought the towers and arches were a mirage, an illusion of ice and light and memory. His eyes watered and he blinked away diamond rainbows, expecting it to dissolve into fancifully melted ice and snow. Colors ran together and he had to abruptly tighten his hand on the paddle as his vision cleared.   
  
The towers were real, spearing the sky, distinct curves and recognizable angles, all unmarked by time, wrapped in the shimmer of a shield. Snow cloaked the towers' bases like a robe slipping from the shoulders of a beautiful woman.   
  
Ronon stared at the glittering edifice until the light dimmed abruptly, clouds rushing between the sun and the dreaming city. A bone-shivering groan echoed across the water, then a bomb-loud boom, as another iceberg calved, and his boat rode up on unseen waves, shaking him from his near trance.   
  
He spun his boat, hoping the passage he'd entered to find this cove hadn't closed behind him. It looked narrower and he glimpsed curls of mist creeping between the blue-white walls of ice. He risked one look back at the Ancient city, then started away.   
  
A new passage opened, wider, a glimpse of light reflecting that he hadn't noticed before, to his left and he aimed the boat toward it.   
  
The flat slap of a tail against water drew Ronon up as another _iq'qaba_ surfaced between him and the passage. It floated in place between the passage and Ronon's boat, then slapped its flukes hard against the water again.   
  
Ronon steered his boat into the narrower passage, wondering if he was being herded for his good or the _iq'qaba_'s. It dove and he felt its movement beneath the boat, a rush that sped it forward faster than his paddling.   
  
Twenty tense minutes later, he emerged into the open sea, his shoulders aching from paddling hard, fingers cold, breathless, adrenaline still singing through his veins. The secret of the city glittered in his mind, a salt-bright sorrow.   
  
The _iq'qaba_ surfaced once more. Its head nosed so close to his boat Ronon could see it had long lashes around its eyes. He stared back, seeing intelligence that was neither human nor hostile in its eye. Then he set his course parallel to the distant shore for the fish camp. The _iq'qaba_ swam along the surface alongside the boat, still watching, until Ronon turned toward the shore again and the water shallowed out too much for its bulk.   
  
Ronon paused again. The camp was visible, smoke rising and twisting in the endless wind, dark twining into the pale mist coiling in from the sea. The warm orange and yellow flicker-dance of several fires caught his gaze, bright against the contrast of dark leather tents, _tupeks_ they'd purchased on frozen Methmar. The gravel strand was strewn with nets, fish shining silver in them, still being gathered up by men and women bundled in furs. A count showed that all the boats had come back in. Voices and laughter carried across the water.   
  
A small figure straightened and pointed to the sea, to Ronon in his boat, and the taller figure beside it, face hidden in a fur-lined hood, cupped hands to his mouth, shouting, "Ronon! Ronon, come in!" _Come in, come in_, the voice echoed over the water. _Ronon, come in_. "There's work to be done!"   
  
There was work to be done.   
  
He lifted his paddle high in the air to show he'd heard them.   
  
In the water beside his boat, the _iq'qaba_ made a wet sound, a gurgle that amped up into a vibrating moan Ronon felt in his bones and sinuses.   
  
"Stop," Ronon grunted. The _iq'qaba_ splashed water up into his boat. Ronon held the paddle across his thighs, leaned to the side, and slapped the water, hard and loud.   
  
The _iq'qaba_ moaned again, then sank down into the water.   
  
Ronon started for the shore. His hand ached with cold from the water and the hollow place that had almost filled again opened once more in his chest. He'd been content as spring bloomed into summer, hunting and scouting, watching Kerren try to romance Joongwa, avoiding Letila's most obvious advances. He had been.   
  
The city in the ice reminded him that he still had his own task, the obligation he'd taken on when he set the Marine-issue combat knife on the conference room table in Atlantis and shoved it rudely toward Caldwell. "I answered to Sheppard," he'd said. _Not you._ Seven months and the Earthers had given their own up, not caring that they all knew Sheppard and McKay were alive, slaves somewhere.   
  
He'd known it was coming, guessed from some of the half-hints Lorne had offered over a shared MRE back on PX5-OD1. "The brass are starting to talk about cutting our losses, you know, Ronon?"   
  
He had known. Still did. They weren't that different from Satedans or any other people. Not in the ways that were wrong.   
  
Seven months hadn't been long enough for him. He'd run for seven years. He would look at least that long.   
  
Kerren waded into the water and caught the prow of Ronon's boat, helping drag into onto the shore. "Another good catch," he said, splashing and grunting a little from exertion. Kerren wasn't a young man; he'd been a service leader when Ronon joined the military, training raw boys into soldiers, and that was thirteen years in the past. "Hives, that's cold!"   
  
"You're too heavy," he added, laughing. Letila stood beyond the lap of the tide and smiled at Ronon. Ronon nodded to her, but didn't smile back. She looked a little like Melena, had the same accent, and reminded him of the way she had moved just enough to re-ignite the old ache. What she wanted from him, he could never give, even if he had meant to stay.   
  
"You're soft," Ronon told Kerren. He stepped out of the boat and helped pull it the rest of the way out of the water, the keel scraping loudly over the wet gravel, then caught the other man's arm. "I'm going."   
  
"When?" Kerren asked.   
  
Ronon rolled his shoulders. If he didn't tarry, he could gate to Rataki, buy whatever information was available and still rendezvous with Teyla on Doldis. Maybe Shemen would know something this time. Maybe he would convince Teyla to leave Atlantis if she hadn't already. Maybe he would tell her about the city of ice.   
  
"Tomorrow."   
  


~*~ 

  
"Two _kulas._" He dug the platinum squares from his vest pocket and flipped them to Shemen, who caught one. The other fell on the wooden tabletop, into a splash of spilled beer, and gleamed briefly, before Shemen's pudgy hand swept it up and it disappeared.   
  
"The Lanteans stole something on Faeatua."   
  
"Stole?" Ronon repeated, amused. Shemen was Genii. It's not like they were paragons of virtue when it came to 'acquiring' anything they wanted.   
  
"What?"   
  
"Something precious, something rare," Shemen said with a shrug. He finished his beer. "Does it matter? Half the Great Market burned and the Lanteans got away with it."   
  
Ronon snorted. They must have found another ZPM, he decided. One with a full charge, otherwise it wouldn't have been worth alienating half the traders in the galaxy. Of course, under Caldwell, the Earthers no longer operated the way they did when Sheppard was in charge of the military. Sheppard paid more attention to Weir. Caldwell made Weir listen to him as soon as he took over military command.   
  
~*~    
  
Maybe if he hadn't missed her, he would have turned back. Maybe if he hadn't drank with Shemen a day before, heard about Faeatua and wondered, he would have let the relentless _samma_ blowing from the south turn him back to the DHD. If he hadn't been lonely and longing to tell someone of the secret city, with its icy spires and diamond bright walls. Maybe.   
  
Instead, he squinted against the grit in the air and forged forward, heading for the trading post that the Doldinians maintained at the nearest oasis. The caravanserai consisted of five buildings constructed against the broken walls of what might have been an Ancestor's outpost, a circle of trees and beyond, the white tents of whichever tribes had come to offer their goods to the offworld traders.   
  
Ronon pushed his way into the second building, stopping to shake sand and dust from his hair.   
  
Teyla wore the same robes as most of the tavern's occupants, but he recognized her immediately. A stab of relief merged with the familiar joy just being with her brought.   
  
He pushed both feelings down and kept his expression under control. The white head cloth concealed all but her eyes and the narrow opening framed the slant of her dark eyes. Ronon noticed the tiny lines at the corners, deeper than they'd been when he first met her. Smile lines, but he thought she did not smile any more often than he did. He nodded.   
  
"Teyla Emmagen," he greeted her, distance in time and space demanding formality between them.   
  
"Ronon Dex," she replied and reached up to cup her hands on his shoulders, small and warm and strong, urging him to dip his head, to rest his forehead against hers. He complied until they were breathing in synch. She laughed when a trickle of sand fell from his hair to the floor. He chuckled.   
  
Her hands tightened on his shoulders and he stilled as she pulled away and stared into his eyes. "They have been found, Ronon."   
  
His breath caught in his chest, a feeling like dropping from too high, and he jerked away from her to look around the tavern. If they had been found, then where were they? All he saw were a bunch of Doldinians and some offworld traders, holed up to wait out the _samma_. No sign of teammates lost for two years. Disappointment welled up in him. They couldn't be bothered to come here?   
  
"Ronon," Teyla said, "Ronon. Listen to me."   
  
He turned back to her. "Are they in Atlantis?"   
  
The first wave of disappointment had receded and he realized they might not able to come. They might still be in the infirmary.   
  
"No." The harsh emphasis sent a spike of adrenaline through him.   
  
"You mean you know where they are but Caldwell wouldn't authorize a mission?" he accused. He didn't like the man, but had still thought better of him than that. Never thought he was another Kell. But if Teyla needed people to go with her to get Sheppard and McKay, Ronon knew he had people who will come now.   
  
"No," Teyla replied quietly. "They are here, on Doldis."   
  
He didn't understand.   
  
"Where?"   
  
"They are waiting with the jumper we took."   
  
"Took," Ronon repeated. Teyla should be more joyous. There was such pain in her eyes, he could only accept that something was very wrong.   
  
Teyla inclined her head. "We cannot return to Atlantis. They intended to separate them, to send Rodney back to Earth, to keep John…"   
  
"To keep John what?" Ronon demanded.   
  
Teyla finally raised her head, meeting his eyes again. Her words were quiet and fierce. "If you are not free, then you are a prisoner. And John has been a prisoner too long. It was necessary to leave."   
  
"They tried to stop you," Ronon said thickly. "Yes," she admitted. "We escaped in a jumper. John and Rodney are with it."   
  
"Why?" he asked.   
  
Teyla hesitated. "I am worried Dr. Zelenka may uncover a way to locate the jumper. I am worried that you will – "   
  
"Will what?" he asked. She didn't think he'd choose the Earthers over his team mates? He'd made that choice when he left Atlantis to continue his search.   
  
She shrugged, a weary gesture. "Not accept them as they are now." Ronon went still and thought about that.   
  
"What?"   
  
Teyla looked at him. "I will tell you," she said. "And if you cannot accept them as they have become, then I will return to the jumper alone, and tell them you were not here, and we will none of us see each other again."   
  
"Unless you tell me they're Wraith worshipers…"   
  
Teyla did not smile.   
  
"Teyla," he said, his voice rough with apprehension. "Tell me."   
  
"Not here," she said.   
  
"Outside," Ronon agreed.   
  
They left the tavern and stepped into the long dusk, where the light was heavy and yellow with dust. The _samma_ whipped cinnamon-colored veils off the peaks of the dunes, spreading them across the green-tinted sky. The trees of the oasis bent, long fronds clattering dryly against each other under the touch of the wind. Ronon pulled a bit of leather out of a pocket and used it to knot his dreads back from his face.   
  
Teyla started walking and he followed her. The sand filled their tracks behind them. She walked beyond the edge of the trade post and, slowly, to the top of the nearest dune. Ronon climbed after her, cursing as his boots sank in the fine, loose sand. He'd always hated desert worlds.   
  
"Tell me," he ground out. She stopped at the top and stood with her arms wrapped around herself.   
  
"I think the world they were taken to was like this. Rodney said…" Her voice broke briefly. The smile she summoned didn't help. "He looked out of the jumper and said it looked like home."   
  
_"Juguik,"_ Ronon grunted, shocked enough to use the old Satedan oath.   
  
Teyla nodded.   
  
"They are together now," Teyla said finally.   
  
"You think I care if they're fucking?" Ronon demanded in disbelief.   
  
"The Earthers cared," Teyla replied. "It is forbidden among them for two men to lie together. You must remember the laws Colonel Sheppard told us of."   
  
"I remember." Ronon shrugged. "Stupid."   
  
Teyla's face has gone solemn. "On Athos, it was not accepted, unless both men had already sired a Duty child. But we knew need."   
  
Ronon grunted. "Didn't realize Athos had the Duty."   
  
Teyla stared at the horizon. "I'm glad of it now, because I fear I will not bear another child as my own."   
  
"Earthers don't have the Duty."   
  
Teyla shrugged. "I lived among them, but I was never of them. No one could be." The wind drew strands of her hair free, blowing them across her lips. "The closer I came, the deeper the divide."   
  
Ronon grunted and stared at the hazy horizon. He'd felt the same many times. Not with McKay. It was one of the things he'd liked best about the man. Sheppard had been an enigma, rarely letting anyone see beyond his amiable surface, but that had extended to everyone, Earther or not.   
  
"No one cared on Sateda."   
  
"Then you should come with us," Teyla said. She touched his arm. "They feared, all this time, that you were dead. When we found them a Faeatua, John asked of you first."   
  
"Can't come with you," Ronon told her.   
  
Teyla stilled and tipped her head, waiting for him to explain.   
  
"Got a place now."   
  
Her voice was stilted. "I am happy for you, Ronon."   
  
He gestured back toward the buildings. "That's why I came this time. To tell you. I found something," He turned away from the oasis. "There's a place for you there, it's a hard world, but…"   
  
Teyla shook her head and stepped away.   
  
"No. John and Rodney need someone."   
  
"For them too," Ronon said. "There's a city there, in the ice, an Ancestor's city."   
  
"Tell me," Teyla demanded.   
  
Ronon shook his head. "Let me tell Sheppard and McKay, too, from the beginning."   
  
~*~    
  
A cold hand rested over Ronon's face.   
  
Not weather cold. Dead cold.   
  
He pulled in a breath, almost gasping at the scrape-grind of bone on bone in his ribs, and gagged silently on the stench of death and dirt. Sound filtered into his consciousness next: a seething hum that made his skin prickle. Then voices. The buzz rose louder. Flies, he thought, too many flies…and then the sizzle-crack of a pulse weapon silenced them suddenly. A thump and a new weight pressed down on him.   
  
A body, Ronon realized, pressing down on more bodies. Part of him catalogued: too light to be Sheppard or McKay. Teyla? He still wasn't clear enough to know where he was, but prey instinct said to stay still.   
  
Predator instinct told him to listen. He took in his circumstances. He was under a body and could feel others, a rigorous tangle of limbs under and over him. Another had just been added without ceremony. He didn't know where he was or who had put him there.   
  
Not Wraith, he knew. Knew the sweet-sick ammonia reek of them, the headache at the back of the skull just being near them induced, and it wasn't present. They didn't kill with their weapons, either, preferring to feed.   
  
The bodies around him were not the paper-light husks the Wraith left. Human, then. Voices. He listened.   
  
"Is that the last of them?"   
  
"Yes, the rest we'll take through the Ring. Might sell them on Halvard, they always need field workers."   
  
"Surprised we sold those last two, I thought we'd have to put them down, like the big one…"   
  
"…something she must have been looking for…"   
  
The voices faded, footsteps moving away with them. Ronon waited until all he could hear was the wind in the grass. He pried one eye open and glimpsed a patch of blue sky beyond the lax fingers that seem to shush him, even now. The light showed him a curve of shoulder that belonged to a woman, but the graying skin was the wrong color. Not Teyla. He watched a cloud shred across his tiny bit of sky, while straining his ears.   
  
The orchestra of insects had begun again, contrapuntal to the birds of this world. The humming buzz resumed. A _ficha_ fly landed on his mouth and crawled over his lip. Ronon twitched, spat to dislodge it, and then groaned. Flies and death. He'd had enough of both.   
  
Some of his memory had returned while he waited. They'd been captured in a gate ambush. Stripped of weapons and clothes, gated to some prearranged market to be sold as slaves. The fly came back. Ronon jerked his head to the side and decided he'd waited long enough. He began crawling out.   
  
Out, he knelt on matted grass, one arm curled protectively around his torso. The sun on this world was dropping toward the horizon and though still warm on his back, he could feel the chill rising from the ground. His lips peeled back from his teeth. He had survived worse.   
  
The light remained bright enough for him to search the faces of the dead dropped unceremoniously into a shallow ravine. None of them were Teyla; none of them were Sheppard or McKay. He would have recognized any of them, even tossed down like garbage: Teyla's slim body, McKay's width of shoulder and pale skin, Sheppard's dark head and lean lines. He saw only graying skin, opaqued eyes, and the marks left by blows and whips. The slavers' last victim lay tumbled atop the rest, a pale woman with long, tangled brown hair, the black burn of the pulse gun used on her half obscuring an infected welt on her back. Innocent as the rest of them, but at least not one of his people. They were not there and something clenched and sick inside him relaxed.   
  
Nothing to be done for the dead; that lesson he had learned long ago. Certain that none of his team were down there, Ronon struggled to his feet and turned his back. If Sheppard and McKay and Teyla weren't there, then they'd been sold.   
  
Halvard, he repeated to himself. There was no way to track which worlds a gate opened to, even the Lanteans were not so skilled, but he had place where the slavers would be.   
  
He followed the track of the slavers' feet back toward the abandoned market. They were careless in many ways. There might be something left behind he could use.   
  
He would find his team.   
  
~*~    
  
His vision swam in and out of focus, the glyphs on the Ring control doubling and swinging and he slapped his hand down on each. He'd had worse when he was running. He had to clutch the edge of the console, though, and his other hand slipped. He pushed against the center crystal last and hung on afterward as the Ring spun.   
  
The Ring filled with mirrored water, rippling with blue-light, more familiar than anything else in his life. He had forgotten how many times he had passed through it.   
  
Ronon blinked at it, then staggered through.   
  
He staggered into night, darkness and screams. Not the Alpha site. There were trees too close and rough-quarried stone that bit cold beneath his feet, while flames fingered the star spattered sky. No distinctive outlines of Quonset huts. A too well-known shrieking-whine cut through his aching head. Ronon groped reflexively for the gun that wasn't at his side and ducked to the side. Movement, black silhouettes, people, he thought blurrily, slid wildly across his vision.   
  
His stomach twisted, rebelling at the fast movement, while the top of his skull threatened to come off. He choked off a pained grunt from the agony in his ribs.   
  
He'd gated into a culling raid.   
  
Another dart screamed over the encampment. Snow dusted pale on the ground and reflected starlight. He watched as a teenager pushed another to the side at the last moment before the dart could scoop them both up. One went to his knees in the dirt. The other was gone. Ronon rolled onto his back under a bush and traced the arcing glint of the dart sweeping away.   
  
Upper atmosphere and that meant they were culling from a hive ship or carrier, not the Ancestors' Ring.   
  
He staggered back to his feet and ran for the console. It didn't matter where the wormhole went, as long as it was established going out, so the Wraith couldn't activate one coming in and trap everyone on the planet. Pigs in a barrel…no, that wasn't it. Fish. Ronon grimaced. It was something Sheppard had said. His head was still ringing. Pigs…pigs to slaughter, judas goats, runners…   
  
He almost fell and someone grabbed his arm, helping him run forward.   
  
"The Ring!" he shouted.   
  
The woman beside him jerked him forward faster. He glimpsed long, gray braids flying and a narrow face, lips pressed thin together.   
  
Others were keening, screaming, running…Another dart swept overhead, the silver culling beam reaching beneath it, snatching away the slow and unlucky. Ronon almost passed the console, dragged by the woman.   
  
"Stop!" he grunted, grabbing onto the edge. His balance failed and she propped him up, hard hands against his flesh, calluses scraping wounds he hadn't noticed before, digging into bruises.   
  
"Hurry," she urged in a rough voice.   
  
He began dialing blind, memory offering up Gessa, an empty world he'd passed through as a Runner. He'd passed through more than once, crisscrossing his own trail over the years, and never seen evidence of anything but ruins and long grass. He'd thought once – before Atlantis – he would have stayed there, alone, if he could have stayed in any one place.   
  
"The Ring, go through the Ancestors' Ring!" the woman holding him up screamed. Ronon thought the sound of her voice, so loud near his ear, might make him pass out. But faces turned toward them and someone else took up the cry.   
  
He hit the center crystal and glanced back toward the trees. The fires were higher now, catching in the tree tops and running through the dry grass and brush below. The Wraith were never satisfied with just taking their prey. They had to destroy whatever had been built and leave any survivors scrabbling in the wreckage.   
  
He could see people who were panicked and running, but most were working fast and hard now: buckling harnessto their beasts, hooking them to wagons, throwing everything they could from their camp into those wagons and carts as quickly as they could. Watchers were stationed at the periphery of the camp, eyes to the sky, warning of each incoming dart, directing people which way to run from the culling beams.   
  
The first carts were already moving, the beasts hauling them stamping and lowing in alarm, as the wormhole stabilized, excess energy draining back into the Ring.   
  
The woman grabbed Ronon's arm and dragged him forward. He stumbled with her, stones cutting into his feet. Then they were at the Ring, running forward, and…   
  
They flew apart, flew together, in a rushing blur of green brightness, between the firing of one synapse and the next.   
  
Ronon went down to his knees, half-blinded by the morning sun of the world they'd reached. He felt every year of his life, seven years running and each one since, every wound, every pain, no matter how well healed, how long past. The stray thought that he couldn't do this forever crossed his mind.   
  
Behind him, the carts and wagons thundered through, pulled at a clattering, out-of-control run, with people clinging to the sides, perched on tops and running next to them. The smell of the night and smoke still clung to them. Panicked animals and desperate voices filled the empty clearing surrounding the Ring.   
  
The Ring clanged and the passage dissolved, leaving Ronon and the woman with the gray braids staring back through its empty eye toward distant, rounded mountains and a red-gold sun sitting vast above them. The long grass under his knees crackled, end of the season dry, yellow-brown and shiny-stemmed.   
  
"Joas, Joas, Joas!" a man called desperately.   
  
"Senya, where are you?" someone else shouted. "Senya!" More voices joined the chorus.   
  
"Nall!"   
  
"Vue!"   
  
"Poridy!"   
  
_Anat, Dowal, Geng, Wonni, Mirit, Bejer, Shum, Zelli, Banhey, Dohss_…Ronon slumped on the ground. He heard someone say, "Shalat is gone," and a high keening wail break from the woman who had called that name. Others joined her, steadily, when they were not answered.   
  
The lament was wordless, just a ululating howl of grief that echoed across the empty plains of a world where the Wraith had left none to mourn before. Ronon lay down on the grass and closed his eyes against the brightness of the sun. It seared incandescent-red through his eyelids though, like the bright plasma explosion that engulfed Melena in his nightmares. He dug his fingers into the dry dirt and added his own howl, wordless and filled with protest and rage, to the wails of these strangers.   
  
~*~    
  
He woke up to the rocking jolt of a wagon on an rutted track, flat on his back in a nest of blankets. The brown leather covering over the arched frame of the wagon had been tied back, letting in light and air. A fringe dangled, flipping and discouraging flies. Harness jingled over the creak of the wagon wheels. Ronon stared out the open back at the pale blue sky and waited out the worst of the throbbing in his head.   
  
The wagon was stuffed with possessions. There was an underlying order, things in their place, but overlaid with items thrust and piled inside without plan. A crumpled child's knit sweater dangled out of a half-shut chest. Ronon closed his eyes again.   
  
The wagon stopped maybe an hour later and the woman from the night before climbed inside.   
  
"Awake?"   
  
He didn't know her accent.   
  
Ronon nodded.   
  
"Good."   
  
"Where?" he asked.   
  
She shrugged. "No name. We'll go through the Ring tomorrow to Ketbatu – there's work there. Harvest." She set about ordering the chaos in the wagon. The chest was closed. Another was opened and a pair of leather pants made for a man possibly even bigger than Ronon appeared. She held them up briefly, glanced at Ronon and then nodded to herself. The pants were dropped over Ronon's legs. "Poridy's."   
  
Ronon fingered the gray leather. Supple yet tough, it was broken in just enough not to creak, had a mottled pattern of scales, and must have come from some large reptile. Good stuff. Not something anyone would give away to a stranger. Poridy. He looked at the woman.   
  
"Wraith took him," she said.   
  
Ronon didn't care. He didn't ask why he was in this woman's wagon, either. He needed to go after the slavers or he would lose their trail. He'd already lost too much time.   
  
He looked at the woman. "You?"   
  
"Joongwa."   
  
"Dex." He sat up, then fell back on his elbows, head thumping brutally, ribs howling protest.   
  
"Stay put," Joongwa told him.   
  
Ronon grimaced and protested, "Too long. Slow." Instinct clawed at him, seven years of reflex, to not stay in any one place, never to rely on anyone, and made his muscles tighten until he could push himself up again.   
  
Joongwa frowned at him. "Stupid. You won't get to the Ring any faster on your feet, fool."   
  
Ronon clenched his jaw, then subsided. She was probably right.   
  
She dug a lightly crushed basket from beneath an iron pot still crusted with food. The basket held a partial loaf of bread and a quarter wheel of cheese. She handed them to Ronon. "Eat."   
  
He tore off a piece of bread and chewed. Stale. Still better than he'd eaten as a Runner.   
  
"You can stay with us if you want," Joongwa said.   
  
He swallowed, bit off some cheese – soft, a little sour – and chewed it with the bread. Shook his head.   
  
Joongwa flipped her braids behind her shoulder, then slapped her knees. Her hands were big, worn, and red at the knuckles.   
  
"You heard of Halvard?" Ronon asked around another mouthful. "Farm world."   
  
"They hire?" Her eyes narrowed.   
  
"No."   
  
"You know the Ring glyphs?"   
  
"Balusi don't go there," Joongwa said.   
  
He'd heard of them. Ring nomads. Culling survivors, criminals, exiles, wanderers. They gave up their names along with their planets. The camp he had stumbled into must have been one of theirs.   
  
"That you? Balusi?"   
  
Joongwa grunted a little, got to her feet, bent over to clear the wagon's roof, and made her way to the rear. Before she dropped to the ground, she spoke. "Now."   
  
Ronon finished the cheese and bread, listening, realizing the wagons had stopped to water the beasts.   
  
~*~    
  
Joongwa gave him two knives: one small enough to hide in his dreadlocks, the other a hunting knife that had also belonged to Poridy. Ronon found himself the recipient of the man's shirt, coat and boots as well.   
  
One of the other Balusi knew the glyphs for Halvard. He showed them to Ronon along with those for Ketbatu.   
  
"Come find us, when you give up hunting," Joongwa told him. Ronon didn't think he would, but he nodded anyway.   
  
~*~    
  
Farm world, Joongwa had called Halvard.   
  
A market town sat within walking distance of the Ancestors' Ring, as was common to many worlds, despite the threat of the Wraith. In truth, there was no hiding from the Wraith. Rings had been buried or blocked on more than one world. The Wraith still came: they had ships; they didn't need the Ancestors' Rings.   
  
Ronon's shoulders tensed against the weight of the sun on them as he passed along the road from the Ring. Fields stretched in every direction to the horizon, green and amber, squares of orderly orchards checker boarding the expanse. Men and women were bent to back-breaking work in the fields while overseers watched from elevated stands. He marked the whips the overseers all carried and the fetters the field workers wore.   
  
He waited until nightfall, until the horizon overtook the moon, then found the foreman of the biggest farm in a fine house standing separate from the barns and the guarded barracks. It took him fifteen minutes with Poridy's knife to find out the slavers had been and gone. Another five to pull the name of the slavers' contact on Rataki from the man. He added the foreman's belt knife to his collection on the way out and used his keys to unlock the slave barracks, tossing them inside.   
  
He missed his pulse pistol, but knives did the job.   
  
Behind him, the Halvardish guards found out just what field hand muscle could do with a scythe and hoe, unfettered.   
  
~*~    
  
Rataki had an actual city, Rata-de. Not as advanced as Atlantis nor as great as Sateda had boasted before the Wraith came, but it teemed with a glut of people by the standards of most planets. So many people they didn't all know each other.   
  
Instead of torches, Rata-de had gas lamps and clanking steam engine vehicles that filled the air with stinking black smoke. It felt foreign to walk its streets, smelling metal and gas, watching people sidle away from him, brushing against them where the streets were too narrow.   
  
Ronon didn't bother with the authorities, didn't trust them. Instead, he walked down a few dark alleys, until someone tried to take away whatever he had. He left his attacker in a gutter, after taking his coin, another knife, and learning where the richer Ring traders kept their offices. Then he went in search of the merchant called Gestay, a slavers' agent. The Halvardish foreman had called him a jelly-soft man and said he kept a line of fat, carved figures in his window.   
  
They reminded Ronon of Weir's office, the little bowl and figures she had on her desk. A string of bells hanging from the door latch tinkled as Ronon walked inside. He stopped and dropped the bar in place to keep anyone out.   
  
"What are you doing?" Gestay demanded, rising from a table covered with small bowls, mostly empty. Grease shined on his chin and his fingers.   
  
Ronon ignored him and closed the carved wood-slat blinds.   
  
"Get out of here."   
  
Ronon picked up one of the little carved figures, a fat man with a flute. He turned it over. Coarse tan clay cheaply glazed. Little cracks ran crazed over the figure's iron red belly. He held it out, then dropped it to the floor. It shattered in a burst of dust. He brought his boot heel down on the largest piece and ground it into powder.   
  
Gestay grimaced and backed up. "Yabon!" he yelled. "Get this animal out of here!"   
  
A heavily musclebound man entered the front of the office from a small door. One look and Ronon dismissed him as a real threat. Yabon was all fat and size, muscle gone soft, small eyes and a slow mind.   
  
"What do you want me to do, boss?"   
  
"Get rid of him," Gestay shouted.   
  
"Tell me where they'll be and I'll go away," Ronon told him.   
  
Gestay laughed, until Ronon broke both of Yabon's arms and left him on the floor, whimpering.   
  
"I can pay," Gestay said. His double chins quivered. "Whatever you want."   
  
Ronon added a fourth knife to his collection, one that Yabon had dropped. He used the pointed tip to clean under his thumbnail and watched Gestay, unblinking. Gestay held out his soft hands before him.   
  
"Don't want money," he said.   
  
"What?" Gestay asked, suddenly eager, "What? I can get…anything. Just don't hurt me."   
  
"Names," Ronon told him, while cleaning the rest of his fingernails. "Names and places." He bared his teeth at Gestay. "I'm looking for someone."    
  
~*~    
  
Time was difficult to adjust from planet to planet, some based their units on planetary revolution, others on moons, tides, geothermal venting, seasons, even animal migration patterns. Gestay, though, provided the key to reading the coded marks the slavers left at the Ring when they moved on. In return, Ronon didn't gut him.   
  
He followed the slavers to three different planets. By the time he reached the third slave market, he knew how to pretend to be a bodyguard to a buyer and moved through the tents without letting himself show any anger.   
  
He searched for three familiar faces automatically, but knew he wouldn't find them among the miserable captives on display. His team had already been sold. But there was finally a face he knew. Ronon grinned, an expression that made more than one man recoil. He knew that man, there before the yellow tent, as he knew the two guards, even to the way their shaved heads gleamed with sweat under the bright sun. He remembered them down to their heavy boots.   
  
Wary that they might recognize him as well, Ronon kept a distance, learning the patterns of the factor's day. He waited until the market crowd had thinned, the slaves were chained in a rough pen, and the two guards had left to find a meal, before he moved.   
  
He swept into the yellow tint and knocked the pulse pistol out of the man's hands before he could pull the trigger. _His_ pulse pistol, he noted. Once he had that tucked in his own belt, he pushed the factor down onto his knees.   
  
Poridy's knife took a good edge. Ronon set it against the slave factor's throat and let it just slide through the skin, drawing a fine red line across the skin.   
  
"I wouldn't move too much," Ronon told him.   
  
"No, I won't. Why…Who are you?" The factor swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing, scraping against the edge of the knife, tiny pinpricks of blood mixing with his stubble, the skin reddening.   
  
"You sold three people," Ronon said. "I want them back. You're going to tell me where they are."   
  
"What?"   
  
Ronon let the knife's own weight sink it into the skin, then pulled back. He stared into the factor's eyes without blinking.   
  
"I…I've sold dozens…"   
  
_ Liar_, Ronon thought. Just this man had sold hundreds, even thousands of men and women. The last weeks had shown him an underside to trade between the Rings he'd never glimpsed as an isolated Runner. He'd seen hundreds of people sold at the two markets he'd been to before and these markets were held regularly.   
  
The slavers were worse than the Wraith. Some of the buyers in the markets probably _were_ Wraith worshipers. The Wraith didn't need to buy their victims, but there were rumors that some hives were beginning breeding programs, farming domesticated humans to replace the falling numbers of wild ones, and they couldn't count on culling to provide exactly what they wanted to breed into their stock. So they bought exactly what they wanted.   
  
"Four people ambushed coming through the Ancestors' Ring, three men, one woman," Ronon told him. "Weeks ago. Your guards left me with the dead bodies in a pit. Remember now?"   
  
"You?"   
  
Ronon let his mask slip enough that the factor could see all the rage than ran through him like the blood in his veins. He kept his voice quiet and the knife steady. "What happened to the others?" The sharp reek of urine filled the tent, mixing with blood and fear sweat.   
  
"I – I sold them. The woman. Then the men."   
  
"Where to?" Ronon demanded, leaning close enough to see the factor's pupils dilate.   
  
"I don't know!"   
  
The factor's voice quivered and rose. "You think I ask the buyers what world they come from? The girl went to some whor–tavern keeper. The men were sold together. That's all I remember!"   
  
"Not good enough," Ronon told him.   
  
The factor thrashed, trying to hit Ronon without slicing his throat against the knife. Then he went still. "You'll never find them," he hissed. "Not where they went."   
  
"You'll tell me."   
  
The fear seemed to drain out of the factor. "You're going to kill me anyway."   
  
Ronon nodded. He scraped the knife down the factor's throat, like he was shaving him, only dry. "If you don't tell me, I'll hurt you first." He paused. "For a long time."   
  
~*~    
  
Atlantis didn't welcome Ronon back. He paced his quarters, skin too tight, heartbeat a drum he needed to run to, but couldn't face the reactions of anyone he'd meet. Without Sheppard, without McKay's voice loud and filling the hollow halls, it was a nightmare relived: flicker of eye-white, recoil, words cut off. Even the people he knew looked like strangers. Everything reminded him of what was missing, even Teyla, strung-taut and simmering; not the woman he'd known, familiar face and angry eyes. The slave factor had died without telling Ronon what he needed to know.   
  
The scientists walked a little slower without the threat of McKay to chivvy them, but their shoulders slumped, and the soldiers' faces were set, no more easy smiles, no matter what flag was worn on their shoulders, frustrated by their failure to find their commander and the suddenly strict regulations.   
  
Caldwell was pragmatic, Weir was cautious: both wanted to analyze, weigh and choose what could be accepted and what cost too much. Ronon already knew what to expect from their leadership. It was cold equations, loss for return, and without Sheppard's heat to counterbalance, loyalty became just another word.   
  
He wanted to _go_. To hunt, instead of running, or at least not stay in place. His quarters were a cage, his bed – sheets stretched flat, white, cold – empty. Always empty in Atlantis, Melena remaining a ghost guarding his heart, but worse now. He wanted to _move_. Status quo was not enough, Sheppard had been the promise of change and action.   
  
He missed McKay, too, more than anyone but Teyla could guess.   
  
He missed Teyla, even when she stood beside him. It wasn't the same without the rest of their team. She wasn't the same, gone distant and judgmental. Wounded in ways healers couldn't touch, too strong to break, but distorted by it. Like a bent blade.   
  
Without their other two, Atlantis was just another place, metal walls and glass, all subtly wrong, and everything seemed dissonant. He wondered if the city had been so undone when Ford held them all, poised, caught in an endless flinch; waiting.   
  
He'd never been any good at waiting.   
  
~*~    
  
"No," Zelenka admitted. "And less now. The batteries will have died months ago." He pushed his laptop away; a small scrape across the surface of the lab bench. He held his hands up, fingers spread, to demonstrate his helplessness. His gaze moved from Ronon to Weir, then Teyla and Major Lorne. Exhaustion grayed his complexion.   
  
Weir nodded. She'd bobbed her hair short. It reminded Ronon too much of the mourning customs of more than one world. "Major? Do you have anything to add?"   
  
Lorne shrugged. "We know they were sold, not…killed. That's something."   
  
Ronon grunted. The slave factor hadn't told him anything else useful. Just that they were sold together. Not proof that they had been kept together, of course.   
  
Teyla looked at Ronon and he felt the weight of her disappointment. She thought the Earthers might have obtained more from the slave factor than Ronon had. Maybe she thought she could have negotiated something from him. Ronon didn't tell her she was wrong. That would have meant explaining exactly how the factor died. He knew too well he'd lost his temper.   
  
Besides, the factor had told Ronon everything he knew. What he knew just hadn't been enough. All Ronon had had left to hold onto had been the hope his teammates would have made it back to Atlantis on their own.   
  
Only Teyla had. And she had…changed. Ronon recognized the anger that simmered through her, but had nothing to offer to ease it.   
  
"So we keep looking," he stated. "They aren't dead. We'll find them."   
  
"Ronon, the odds are worse with every day," Weir said gently. "Of course, we'll go on searching, but without some clue – "   
  
"We could still get lucky," Major Lorne added, nodding to Weir, who had her arms crossed over her torso and her lips pressed together. "Ronon managed to learn the next planet where the slavers will be holding their market."   
  
Weir inclined her head. Zelenka looked – like he didn't want to say how unlikely it would be – filled with sadness he couldn't express, a man already mourning his friend. Lorne didn't look like he believed what he was saying, either. Ronon had to look away. His hands tightened into fists.   
  
"I'll include the updated status in the next databurst," she said. She managed a small smile. "It's good to have you back, at least, Ronon. And maybe after this, we'll have more good news to send back to Earth. Colonel Caldwell and the _Daedalus_ will arrive in another four weeks. Perhaps we'll have something by then."   
  
He grunted. Earth didn't matter to him. He'd never been there and the Earthers that mattered hadn't been going back there, either. Not again. Caldwell wasn't bad, but he'd done nothing to earn Ronon's obedience.   
  
He went with Lorne's team and Teyla. Then he went with Teyla to meet Halling's trading contacts. He ran along Atlantis' deserted corridors between missions. He sparred with Teyla when neither of them could bear the company of the other Earthers. One month dissolved into another and another. Caldwell stayed on and the _Daedalus_ returned to Earth, then to Atlantis, bringing new faces.   
  
They found more renegades. They never found a trace of Sheppard or McKay.   
  
For everyone else, life moved on without them. Only Lorne and Cadman's teams still went out on search missions, while the scientific explorations were reinstated.   
  
A Genii information broker sent word of slaving raids on PX5-OD1. Teyla convinced Weir to authorize a mission. Ronon heard the reluctance in her voice, even as she authorized it.   
  
~*~    
  
Three stargates later, with two marines wounded, they returned to Atlantis with nothing. Beckett's replacement, a quiet man named Reinhardt, stitched up a gash on Ronon's thigh without fussing. Then he offered Garner an icepack for his groin. Marks was already in surgery. He'd probably keep his leg. Ronon had seen men take worse wounds and still walk. Garner, he didn't care about: he'd deserved what Teyla had dished out.   
  
Two weeks after that, Weir held another meeting, this time with Caldwell beside her, dressed in expedition uniform.   
  
The search was ended.   
  
One day later, Ronon left Atlantis behind. He wasn't ready to give up.   
  
~*~    
  
Ketbatu had been culled. Smoke still twined black into the sky from the fires burning through the wreckage of the city. The streets were empty.   
  
Ronon lifted his face to the sky, watching, listening for darts. Behind him, the Ring shut down. Silence, then the wind, replaced the indefinable sound of the gate in operation. The Wraith were gone, along with the people. A Great Culling, like he'd heard of in stories, not just a Hunt or the destruction of a civilization, like Sateda, that might reach a height that would threaten the Wraith.   
  
He'd left Ketbatu only days before, hunting another slave market, on a rumor relayed by a _pohli_. It had been another dead end and he'd returned, hoping she'd know something more, something else he could follow up, or maybe just to sleep in a bed next to another person. Melena's memory had receded enough he could enjoy that again.   
  
He had run out of trails to follow, of names and planets. Ronon stood in the debris-strewn street, listening, waiting for a sense that any Wraith lingered. Nothing stirred beyond the flap of a broken shutter hanging off one hinge, _squeal, bang_, _squeal, bang_, and the wind.   
  
The Wraith destroyed, but they didn't steal. Too tired to go on or back to another world through the gate, Ronon started walking forward. Cracked stone and broken glass crunched under his boots. Blood from the man he had killed on Petyama still stained the cuff of his coat sleeve.   
  
He shouldered his pack a little higher and kept one hand at the gun at his side, detouring around blackened craters and debris, to the inn where he'd stayed before. It stood untouched except for one caved-in corner. The room he had used remained sound. No one left to care that he laid down and put his dirty boots on the bedding.   
  
In the morning, he went looking for the animal he could hear lowing in distress, hungry or in need of water, and found the dried husk, limbs and ribs like a bundle of gray sticks, in the garden behind the inn. The long hair, caught and tangled on a thorny _tomi_ vine, was bone-white, not the dyed wine-red Ronon remembered, but he recognized the silver and jade beads she'd threaded into her braids. The flower tattoo on her cheek was an indistinguishable blur.   
  
Ronon left and followed the noise to a barn, let the animal still penned inside loose, then picked up a shovel before walking back to the garden. He buried the husk next to a section of broken wall, where the _tomi_ would grow wild and bloom each fall, in its backward way, spikes of yellow flowers full of pollen that smelled like salt and honey.   
  
The sun had reached its zenith when he finished and sweat ran down his back and sides. The air smelled of burning by then and the light had gone yellow, dimmed and smoky. Looking to the west, flames were visible licking skyward.   
  
Ronon retrieved his pack and headed away, back to the Ring. Birds flew up in a tumult of wings, loud in the silence, as Ronon reached the plaza surrounding the Ancestors' Ring.   
  
On Ketbatu, the Ancestors had still been venerated and the people had built the city around the Ring, despite the Wraith.   
  
Ronon dialed Methmar and stepped into the water-ripple of the Ring without looking back. Ice-crystals on a cruel wind cut into his face as he stepped out: Methmar was always and ever cold, its Ring sitting on a barren, permanently frozen plain.   
  
He pulled his coat closer around him and slogged through the waist-high snow to the circle of _tupeks_. The nomads that made Methmar their home didn't fear the Wraith. Methmar was too cold for them. That made the unforgiving world a trade center despite the cruel weather. Much more was available for purchase in the oiled-leather tents besides the furs the tribes brought in.   
  
He ducked into the closest _tupek_. The dyed-bone beads sewn around the doorway identified it as a tavern slash traders' inn.   
  
He was still shaking the snow from his hair when a hard hand clamped down on his shoulder. Ronon knocked it away on instinct, bringing a knife up, and stopped.   
  
"Kerren Par," he said.   
  
"Solen told me he'd seen you on Belken," his first service leader replied. Kerren's face was burned dark, wind-chapped, and his hair had gone steel-gray. He lifted a big hand – the one that taught Ronon to first hold a gun – and pushed the knife aside.   
  
"It's good to see you, boy."   
  
"Hunh," Ronon grunted, then thumped Kerren's shoulder. "What are you doing here?"   
  
"Buying furs," Kerren told him. He waved Ronon to pass the rest of the way into the _tupek_, opening the second door flap. They both had to duck almost double to enter, but it was warm inside, oil lamps providing light and the heavy, tightly-bound bales of furs made comfortable, dry seats.   
  
"Furs?"   
  
Kerren gave him a sharp look, then said, "Plenty of us didn't care for Kell. We found a world to resettle."   
  
Ronon grunted. So Kerren knew he'd killed Kell.   
  
"It's a cold bitch most of the year, but there's fishing. That's what we're trading here. Smoked fish for furs." He held up two fingers and nodded to the man at the center of the _tupek_, filling tankards from stacked kegs.   
  
Ronon grunted again and wrapped his hands around the horn tankard a girl brought. The contents were spicy, alcoholic and hot. The steam made his eyes water. He drank half of the heated liquor immediately.   
  
Kerren sipped his own drink. "You should come back with me," he said.   
  
"Can't."   
  
"Got someplace?" Kerren asked.   
  
"Looking for someone," Ronon answered, though he didn't know where he'd look next. He'd never been any closer to finding Sheppard and McKay than the slave factor in the beginning.   
  
Kerren nodded. "Mele–"   
  
"No," he interrupted. "She died."   
  
"Tell me who then," Kerren said. Ronon stared down into the dark contents of his tankard. He was tired. He took another sip and began.   
  
"Sheppard and McKay…"


End file.
